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> Many officials in Lebanon have previously said in private they believe a lot of the shipment was stolen. This seems plausible. If so, this would be one of th

• londons_explore 5y ago
  Unless the fire and explosion was deliberate to cover up the fact it had mostly all been stolen... And maybe the explosion turned out much larger than the thieves expected...
  • eloff 5y ago
    That's plausible. Never underestimate greed and the desire to avoid being caught for a crime.
    • bogomipz 5y ago
      No. While it is "possible" it is certainly not "plausible." Please explain why if you were trying to divert attention away from a stolen good such as fertilizer you would engage in a criminal act on such a scale as to get the world to focus on the very thing you would like to draw attention away from?
      • eloff 5y ago
        If you felt your theft would be discovered, you could very easily expect the explosion would destroy all traces of the theft and nobody would know any better. Many people, especially uneducated people, would not have expected that the theft would be detectable by the size of the explosion. I'm pretty smart and well educated, but I'm not even sure such a thing would have occurred to me, and even if it did I might have preferred my odds taking my chances on that anyway. To be very clear though, I wouldn't have done something so heinous in the first place. Given the sequence events, with the welding going on etc, I don't think this happened. But not for the reasoning you gave.
        • IG_Semmelweiss 5y ago
          I see your point and i almost want to give it to you, but there's a nuance you didnt catch. The people trafficking on this were most likely terrorists. They use this stuff all the time. We are not terorrists so we may not be versed on blowing up such incriminating evidence. They however, presumably used it all the time. They would have known better than you or me on this topic
          • deleted 5y ago
            [deleted]
      • krisoft 5y ago
        Look I don't believe in this theory. But the part you are missing is the "And maybe the explosion turned out much larger than the thieves expected..." You look at the explosion see how big it was and say "nobody would be willingly cause that big of a problem to hide a smaller crime." But when you think that you are thinking backwards. You know how big the explosion was, therefore you conclude whoever did it must have known how big the explosion will be. That's not really correct. They might have underestimated for technical reasons, they might have underestimated because they are incompetent. It is kind of like asking "who would burn down 22,744 acres for a gender reveal party?" Nobody intentionally, that's for sure. But the Earth is full of stupid and/or incompetent people.
        • perl4ever 5y ago
          >It is kind of like asking "who would burn down 22,744 acres for a gender reveal party?" There seems to be a massive fire in Turkey, said to have been started by children "burning books". https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/two-children-accused-of-marmaris-fire-say-they-were-burning-books-166704 https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/two-children-accused-of-ma...
  • DevKoala 5y ago
    This is also what I see as a possible explanation. Also, why would you get downvoted?
    • ashtonkem 5y ago
      Because it’s a conspiracy theory without any evidence, and isn’t even plausible. They blew up their own port to distract from the explosives/fertilizer they were stealing? Hanlon’s razor applies here.
      • addingnumbers 5y ago
        If you use Hanlon's Razor in criminal investigations, most criminals are going to walk. Most thieves don't hold equity or title to the structures they're stealing from. It's dubious to imply the people working in that warehouse have a greater interest in keeping the dock standing than in staying out of prison.
        • ashtonkem 5y ago
          I have no idea what point you’re trying to make.
          • deleted 5y ago
            [deleted]
      • DevKoala 5y ago
        Dude relax. Not everybody keeps up with every worldwide event. I didn’t realize there was an investigation and a conclusion with 100% confidence of what happened, thus denying this possibility. Just replying with a link saying “the investigation claims this is what happened, here is the link…” would have been enough.
        • ashtonkem 5y ago
          Pointing out why a theory is implausible and lacks evidence is a “dude relax” moment? What?
  • system2 5y ago
    This will feed conspiracy theorists for decades to come.
    • spuz 5y ago
      The difference between a conspiracy theorist and a healthy sceptic is that the more implausible the theory the more convinced the conspiracy theorist will be and the less convinced the sceptic will be. Since real conspiracies and cover ups do happen, it should be possible to speculate about conspiracy theories without falling into the trap of conspiracy theorist thinking by applying a healthy dose of Occam's razor.
      • latchkey 5y ago
        Hey @spuz... great response. Just wanted to let you know that the link in your profile goes to a junk website. Looks like a domain squatter got it.
        • appleiigs 5y ago
          the conspiracy theory is that spuz is the domain squatter! or is that Occam’s razor
        • spuz 5y ago
          Uh thanks. It was a link to a site called hackernewsusers.com which I guess was some project of a HN user back in the day but no longer exists.
      • Raineer 5y ago
        This is very well stated. A healthy reminder of how logical thinking should be applied, especially in 2021.
      • perl4ever 5y ago
        If a conspiracy theory is popular, then rejecting it kind of means you have to believe in a conspiracy to promote the conspiracy theory.
  • herendin2 5y ago
    But the (video documented by multiple sources) sequence of events on the day fits the scenario of an accidental detonation very well: repair work involving hot welding the door, a slowly growing fire, then successively larger explosions capped by an enormous blast after an hour. It all took so long that the fire department had arrived If one has access and just wants to destroy the evidence in a big boom, there's no need for so much complication and the uncertain results of it. Just pour gas on the pile, light a long fuse and run, fast.
    • ashtonkem 5y ago
      Also, blowing up the fertilizer (and the port) to hide the fact that you were stealing fertilizer isn’t exactly a plausible story. People can be dumb, but come on.
      • addingnumbers 5y ago
        Are you suggesting it's unthinkable that someone would burn down a crime scene? It happens a lot. Crime concealment consistently places among the top 6 motives in studies of arson. I'm not saying it's a very likely cause, but it would be hasty to rule it out
        • throwanem 5y ago
          Are you suggesting that someone trucked away two thousand tons of ammonium nitrate without anyone noticing, presumably for the purpose of recycling it into explosives and thus in full knowledge of its explosive properties, and then capped this incredible achievement in stealthy theft by setting off the rest of it as an improvised bomb that drew every eye in the world? Because I'm not sure how that isn't what this claim of yours really adds up to, and I'm not going to call it impossible, but I am going to say it needs more substantiation than you have as yet seen fit to give it.
          • addingnumbers 5y ago
            I'm saying it would be premature to discount the possibility. A low-level dock supervisor could have been peddling this stuff for years, got spooked, and decided to cover his tracks, perhaps underestimating the size of the explosion, and assuming that the blame for an explosion would be spread too thin for his own liability to outweigh his personal, severe liability for his previous crimes. The comment I was replying to seems to assume this scenario is ridiculous without giving it due consideration. Again, I'm not saying this is a likely hypothesis, just that it's a credible possibility and didn't deserve the knee-jerk ridicule it was given.
• tgtweak 5y ago
  For whoever is counting, 5 wrongs and 4 rights do in fact still make a wrong.
  • ineedasername 5y ago
    And even that assumes rights and wrongs are a sort of fungible screwup-based currency where one can in fact cancel the other out. An interesting concept to play around with though: You'd essentially need currency that has both negative & positive denominations. In addition, you couldn't have a "100 Wrong Bill" because wrongs aren't fungible. A single wrong will differ in magnitude than another. To accurately denominate wrongs, you'd probably have to ditch quantity bills in favor of magnitude bills, and likely on a logarithmic scale too because the magnitude can vary so widely. "Oops I got into a fender bender" is too far away from "Oops I accidentally cause the largest non-nuclear explosion" Unfortunately it seems like it's easier for a single wrong to have an outsized impact than it is for a single right, so the negative denominations of this right/wrong currency would need to be logarithmic while the positive end would still probably need to be linear, and a sum of the two would still almost always come up negative.
    • tclancy 5y ago
      Someone should make a new digital currency based on this idea.
      • mjburgess 5y ago
        The USD exists. We price liability/damage/benefit all the time
        • ericbarrett 5y ago
          Agreed; if you squint a little, this what actuaries do.
        • ineedasername 5y ago
          I'm thinking about it as more of an abstraction layer for the direct exchange of benefits/detriments of right/wrong acts, where a modified version of normal spending-money currency still acted as the medium of exchange for goods and services. Just a thought experiment really, about what a "moral" (for lack of a better word) currency could look like. Completely impossible and without clear definitions of a right or a wrong and ignoring the practical reality that a wrong can't really be cancelled out. As I said, just a thought experiment. Let's call it "The Moral Currency Conjecture" A currency with negative and positive denominations directly built in, no separate system of debt. One where anyone could mint more currency through their own actions. Maybe the most value for an individual would be obtained by keeping their net worth as close to 0 as they could. Normal currency would be a medium of exchange to affect & incentivize the transfers. As "wrongs" seem easier to produce, anyone with excess "rights" would be under pressure to divest themselves back towards neutrality to thereby ensure as many wrongs as possible were cancelled out. To incentivize this, the value of the normal currency would be tied to a person's proximity to a net 0 balance in the moral currency. Negative moral currency balance, less buying power for the same dollar. Same for positive moral currency balances, with the except that if the global supply of the moral currency had a positive net balance, then the normal currency value would increase in proportion so that a positive moral currency balance didn't incur a penalty. Assuming there would always be more wrongs than rights, putting rights at a premium, however much money a person accumulated by doing wrongs would not be enough to purchase enough rights to get back to net zero, so you couldn't just steal or fraud your way into money and assume you'd buy your way clear. Meaning that in order to have a balance close to net zero a person would have to do at least some rights. In addition, debt with normal currency could be dealt with by doing more rights and selling them off. The whole system would make it difficult to be successful by doing wrong things. Eventually it would shift the world through it's incentives to a net good balance gradually improving the world. Although at that point, normal currency might become more inflationary, and so the nature of the system might end up being a pendulum. But to bring things back closer to reality, those with bad intentions and a desire to accumulate power might do so too quickly to have the monetary system catch up, giving them the resources to subvert the system in some way. Or you'd need massive public service projects to ensure that people with so many wrongs that they shifted their normal currency values below sustenance levels had a way back from that situation. It would also require a nearly perfect knowledge of rights and wrongs along with precise methods of assessing their magnitude, especially difficult when a right thing may eventually have a very negative and not easily foreseeable impact, e.g., proper recycling of harmful industrial byproducts back into something safe ends up causing cancers in the long term. But ignore all that. This isn't a real proposal. (It's also not a problem for blockchains to solve.) It's just a thought experiment.
• ReptileMan 5y ago
  Since explosions work on cubic law probably not much worse. And ammonia has pretty low detonation speed. It would have been worse, but probably 10-20% more destruction.
  • jhgb 5y ago
    What if this were the difference between the silo shielding a part of the town, and the silo being completely obliterated? Also, the cube root of 5 is not 1.2-1.3 anyway, but quite a bit more, so there's that.
  • baybal2 5y ago
    If ammonia was wet, it could've reduced the detonation power many times. Since it was a port, and a non air conditioned warehouse, it's not that much of a stretch to say that this must have played a role too.
  • PicassoCTs 5y ago
    Eh, it depends? Explosive that is blown up, as in ejected upwards before igniting can become a 2nd explosion, shaping the first one below into something more dangerous.
  • nullc 5y ago
    You mean that the pressure from an explosion follows the inverse cube of the distance, so even increasing the explosive power a lot wouldn't matter that much because the distance to damaging-pressure (for whatever threshold you choose) would only increase with the cube root of the factor it was increased by? How do you get 10% more? Based on that logic I'd expect the damage radius to be 1.6x the size for a 5x larger explosion, which would mean 2.5x the area inside a damage-threshold pressure contour.
    • ReptileMan 5y ago
      Mostly because ammonia is shitty explosive. So it just wouldn't explode that efficiently if we make the pile bigger. The fact that it is 5 times bigger doesn't mean that it would release 5 times the energy in a detonation.
• joe_the_user 5y ago
  The thing about the "maybe they made it less bad" argument is that the authorities repeated refusal to let the shipment be moved could have come because they wanted it there so that it could be stolen (with said authorities paid-off for that). The explosion could even have been an effort to cover the tracks of those involved. Edit: I have no non-public information, of course. But I have read that some people were understandably worried and tried to get the shipment moved and the authorities squashed that effort.
  • adrusi 5y ago
    I agree it's likely that it was stored there specifically to be stolen, but I seriously doubt the explosion was meant to cover up the corrupt affairs. Even if you assume the people involved didn't care about civilian lives one iota, big explosions draw attention. And realistically criminals, even terrorists, and definitely corrupt officials actually are not typically into wantonly murdering their neighbors. Maybe they underestimated the size of the blast, but more likely improperly stored explosive chemicals just exploded.
    • mike_d 5y ago
      It is "common knowledge" among people who construct IEDs that the fertilizer needs to be mixed with diesel or another fuel to generate a large explosion. However ammonium nitrate will act as its own oxidizer and fuel. They may have falsely believed it would be a small explosion because it was lacking what they thought was a critical component.
      • contravariant 5y ago
        That kind of seems like an unlikely next step for the same people who were supposedly ignoring repeated warnings that this could cause a massive explosion.
• ineedasername 5y ago
  It doesn't pay off if it was stolen because it's a chemical easily converted into more bombs.
  • tpmx 5y ago
    I don't think it's particularly hard to acquire fertilizer in this region, before or after the blast.
    • ineedasername 5y ago
      Probably not. Hypothetically, it would be incredibly easy to acquire, at no cost, if it was fairly well know that a few million pounds of it was available for minimal effort behind a poorly guarded broken warehouse door. Why, I'd speculate that as much as 80% might be stolen before chance, incompetence, and bad luck came together to blowup the remaining 20%. Hypothetically. :) That aside, this wasn't fertilizer. It was high purity explosives grade nitrate that had been enroute to a place intending to use it in explosive applications, not farming. That might be easier to obtain in Lebanon than other countries but it still doesn't fly completely under the radar. And why bother when there's a freighter worth of free supply? Fertilizer would be easy to get a hold of, but take more more money, effort and larger quantities for the same bang, if that was the reason for buying it. Plenty of the Beirut supply might have been stolen to adulterate down to fertilizer concentrations, but a non-zero number of people were interested in its military applications, and it's existence wasn't a secret. And millions of pounds were stolen so it's fairly plausible some of it was stolen for use in explosives. That was actually one of the proposed disposal mechanisms by those who tried to get the government to act on the issue: Give it to the Lebanese army.
  • kjaftaedi 5y ago
    It wasn't stolen by burglars, it's stolen in the sense that someone pockets some money for letting the supply leave the holding facility. They technically don't own it, but the owners were never going to pay the fine to get their property back. It's the inevitable course of events in these situations.
• bostonsre 5y ago
  It could be a little too early to claim that. Whoever stole it won't be baking cookies with it. It is a country with a war torn past with tons of individuals and competing factions that know how to use it effectively.
• senectus1 5y ago
  what about the idea that the explosion was due to somebody trying to cover their theft tracks... they just underestimated the result?
• rtkwe 5y ago
  The most likely explanation is probably that some was stolen and some just didn't detonate, a mix of both theories. This is definitely a case of massive lack of care at least.
• yyyk 5y ago
  * Russian-leased ship under apparently untraceable ownership. * Captain receives an order to make unscheduled stop for an undisclosed shipment. Which means the destination was never announced under the travel plan. * Ship is impounded and intended shipment never arrived, yet owner shows no interest despite supposedly being fleeced. * Government prevents any legal attempt to clear the cargo, yet leaves it unguarded. * Cargo is pilfered by unknown people. Whatever they do with it is something that does not mind the poor storage conditions. * Cargo turns out to be rather explosive. * Did I mention there was a large civil war next door, and one side is a significant Russian ally? Assuming a plot in this case is hardly unreasonable.
  • zardo 5y ago
    > Did I mention there was a large civil war next door, and one side is a significant Russian ally? Doesn't Russia just provide it's allies with military equipment? I don't see why they would execute this strange plan to get explosive material to anyone they openly support.
    • yyyk 5y ago
      Russia could have sent material directly but that would have implicated them directly in Assad's war. In 2013, Russia wasn't as hands on as it would be a few years later, trying to keep a bit of distance from his atrocities would have been reasonable. I do admit there are other possible clients for explosive material in the area.